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Deep Inside This Museum Lies the Holy Grail of Adventure Games

The library inside the National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York isn’t your average hall full of dog-eared books. It houses some original documents used in the making of some of the most legendary, important videogames ever created. And we got to see them.

In the third of WIRED’s series of Game|Life videos filmed at the Museum, we enter the Library and Archives and find something even we were not expecting to see: Roberta Williams‘ original notepads and design documents from the making of the King’s Quest adventure game series. Williams’ pioneering work launched one of the most popular genres of the early days of personal computer gaming, blending the gameplay of text adventures like Zork with beautiful color graphics. For the right kind of nerd, to have her original notebooks sitting in front of you is like getting to flip through a first draft of The Hobbit.

Later, we look at some more pieces of Sierra On-Line history — some of the company’s earliest games, sold in little plastic baggies that held the floppy disks and photocopied instruction manuals.